Prologue: A Girl on Trauma: When You're Better Off Dead

Prologue: A Wound Unlike Any Other

Sitting on a mildly comfortable sofa I poured my soul out on to the floor before the new psychologist I was seeing at the time. It was a struggle to accept that I needed help; I didn’t want to be so broken that I needed someone with a medical degree to tell me I was a wreck. Accepting that I needed to go was hard but spilling my best-kept secrets was no issue when it came right down to it.

I took that first hour together and gave her just a taste of how horrific my life to that point had been. It was a way for my heart to rebel against this need. If I told her how things had been growing up she would be horrified and send me away. Most who got too close would get the same treatment. I loved and hated that attention. Much to my young amazement, she listened carefully and didn’t so much as arch a brow at the stories I was rattling off like a shaken victim.

Leaning forward with that mass of blonde hair I’d kept my eyes on, she finally spoke. Her words were not ones of pity, they were matter-of-fact. “Your mother sounds like she has borderline personality disorder,” she stated in that soft tone. A few of my circuits fried right there, it was a disorder I was unfamiliar with. At an age where I was supposed to know all, she had stumped me.

She began her explanation and said while she couldn’t diagnose her, she could give me something to research. It was something to give me a piece to the puzzle that was my mother. She was my second therapist in many years and she’d offered me more than I could have ever found with my own two hands. She gave me a gift beyond measure.

I ran home that night and read away the evening. It was all I could do not to pull out my journal and make my own bullet-point presentation on how many ways this diagnosis was tailor-fit to my worst nightmare. It was perfect for her, for my mother. No shoe could have adorned her feet quite as well as borderline personality did. Everything I read made me exclaim out loud, “Ah-hah!” It wasn’t much and I was too young to self-help using it, but it stayed with me until I met R some years later.

After only two hour long visits my psychologist was fired for reasons they legally could not tell me. It was a massive blow to be placed with a fresh-from-school doctor that had no real experience. I was open and the raw wounds were still fresh from finally opening up to someone. She didn’t see what the other had; she told me to come back in a month. I never went back.

As I staggered through the next handful of years I kept BPD close and any mental help at an arm’s length. It was a dark time full of spiraling, self-harm, fulfilling destructive urges, and so much more. I have claimed those years as ones to be forgotten, but here they still linger even as I type. This writing, for now, is only for myself. It is my own way of finally letting the toxins of my upbringing seep out and goes in to the wind. This will be my farewell to those memories I first laid at the feet of the blonde doctor who gave me a shred of hope that lit my way for the years following. This is my story.

My pseudo name is Lien Laine and I am a nearly thirty year old working adult who carries with her the scars of a traumatic childhood. At one point in my young life I wore my shattered heart on my sleeve, the busted pieces all hastily held together with safety pins and superglue. It was quite a work of art if I must say so myself. I was a unique display of experiences that left doctors puzzled and my friends concerned. These days I have been working hard with a professional counselor, R, to make things right with my less than pleasant outlook on life.

This story starts in a perpetually raining gray home and ends with a fractured adult that huddles against a dying flame of childhood. I crave attention and am particularly manipulative much like my mother, the queen in this telling, taught me throughout my youth. We, the little girl in my memories and I, still have a long road ahead of us to complete any kind of therapy. From one end of the scale to another the diagnoses I have been given have shed light on what trauma can do to a developing mind. I write this to you not out of some ploy for your pity, I am doing this pour out the sickness and re-frame the atrocities of my most tender years.

I never once turned to illegal substances for my pain but I hurt myself in so many other ways. From starvation to multiple suicide attempts, I have been on polar ends of sanity. It is a staggering game that makes me queasy with the mere idea of what I can and cannot do for release. My first suicide note was written in green crayon at the age of ten and the last was just a few days ago. It’s easy to say, “get over it,” unless you have been through the fields of battle that I have. Until you live with a psychotic borderline you cannot understand. I hope you, dear reader, never understand what it is like to live a day inside of my mind.

A handful of medications are the only thing keeping me alive at this point in my growth. That’s okay by me. I may have suffered through years of physical, mental, and emotional abuse but here I still stand. I am proud to look at myself in the mirror and say, “you made it.” It does get better with time and I am here to scream that from the pages of this autobiography. I thank you for reading this far and hope you can garner something from my strung together stories of my life.

Welcome to “A Girl on Trauma: When You’re Better off Dead,” it is my sincerest hope that through my struggle of a story at least one person will find solace that in this ever-expanding world, they are not alone. You are not alone. It does get better. You are strong and for that, I am so proud of you. Now, let’s begin this circus of a book in the earliest years I can recall with this shoddy memory.